John Kiriakou was sitting alone when he got a package he had been waiting for for some time: a copy of the Senate torture report.

It would seem almost a vindication of his work to expose the crimes of the CIA.

Except he was sitting alone in a jail cell, finishing out his sentence for doing the very thing U.S. senators were being hailed for.

The report revealed, in astonishing detail, how agents waterboarded suspects, deprived them of sleep, hung them by their hands for the ceiling while naked, and even how they forced them to eat pureed food from a method now known as rectal-feeding.

Excused violations of ethical standards by inappropriately characterizing health professionals engaged in interrogation as “safety officers,” masking one of their key functions

Implemented rules that permitted medical and psychological information obtained by health professionals to be used in interrogations

Required physicians and nurses to forgo their independent medical judgment and counseling roles, as well as to force-feed competent detainees engaged in hunger strikes even though this is forbidden by the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association

Improperly designated licensed health professionals to use their professional skills to interrogate detainees as military combatants, a status incompatible with licensing

Failed to uphold recommendations by the Army Surgeon General to adopt international standards for medical reporting of abuse against detainees.

The young reporter tries to make sense, to rationalize the actions of present day US military activity!

There is no making sense!

This is what it is!

It is now the history of the US. It will never be erased!

In future days when the US is mentioned young people will comment, 'Oh! You mean that country that used to sodomize its prisoners!'

Another will comment: 'And the forced feeding, don't forget the forced feeding. It was one of the countries that stuck pipes down prisoners throats, forcing them to eat. They forced the pipes so severely that the blood would squirt up around the outside of the pipe.'

At the time of his arrest, he was beaten to the point of losing consciousness!

He was kept naked and isolated in a cold dark room for three weeks, where both during and in between interrogations he was frequently
beaten, including being hit on the head and in the jaw with a rifle and stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver!

He was then placed in isolation in a urine-soaked room for two months!

Broken laws broken lives

All individuals who played any role in the torture or ill-treatment of detainees, including those who authorized the use of methods amounting to
torture or exercised command authority over them, should be held to account through criminal and civil processes (such as disciplinary action).

Officials at every level should be held accountable for crimes they committed or for the acts of officials subordinate to them.

Health professionals, both civilian and uniformed, who engaged in or facilitated the abuse of detainees and/or failed to report torture
and ill-treatment should be investigated, appropriately sanctioned,and disciplined via the Department of Defense, other executive branch agencies,state licensing boards.

In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration's 'war on terror,' which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.

The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges.

The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for terrorists.

Humans for money

Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent people.

In addition, the Bush regime needed "terrorists" prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.

As there was no evidence against the 'detainees; (most have been released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against torture in order that the government could produce evidence via self-incrimination.

The Bush regime found inhumane and totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime did not need to obey the law.

The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the detainees.

As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized by the regime as 'the 760 most dangerous men on earth,' there was little public outcry over the regime's unconstitutional and inhumane actions.

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all.

Humans for prisons

Soon U.S. citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus rights.

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, might have been the first.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military's notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan.

Her three young children, one an 8-month-old baby, were with her at the time she was abducted.

She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children.

Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.

An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier's rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him.

The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier's excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder.

The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range.

No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier.

No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Trial took an unusual turn

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial:

"The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers."

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim.

This is the kind of "justice" that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach.

Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

Anyone can be next.

Indeed, on Feb. 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government's judgment that an American is a threat.

No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced.

A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.

Waco

Ruby Ridge

The Black Panthers

The US Congress
/Nebraska Pedophile cover-up killings

Oklahoma City Bombing

Sears Tower in Chicago

9/11

So many more not even on the radar screen — Kewe Kewe.info

I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans abroad as it kills them at home — Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.

Most American people know their government is now nothing more than a police state, but they choose to do nothing.

Mike Hastie: 'Police working the people in the street like they were sheep.

Children walking in a wedding party in Afghanistan, U.S. drones coming in for
the kill.

Most American people know their government is lying, but they choose to do nothing.

It's a matter of fear: fear that they might spend time in jail, fear that they might get hurt, fear that they might have to pay a fine, fear that they won't be accepted at church.

US Police state.

Paul Craig Robers: 'In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.'

Mike Hastie: 'Police working the people in the street like they were sheep.

Children walking in a wedding party in Afghanistan, U.S. drones coming in for
the kill.

Most American people know their government is lying, but they choose to do nothing.

It's a matter of fear: fear that they might spend time in jail, fear that they might get hurt, fear that they might have to pay a fine, fear that they won't be accepted at church.

Ever see a dead child after a U.S. drone was invited to a wedding party?'

Photo: Mike Hastie
U.S. Army Medic
Vietnam 1970-71
Jan. 8, 2010

Blows to the testicles

Waterboarding

Inoculated through injection with a disease for dog cysts

Total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep

Smearing of feces on prisoners

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo.

Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated … through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding.

Under authority of American military personnel

Conducted in presence of medical professionals

The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

The force is officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force.

Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture — and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal — IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.

Extreme Repression Force

IRF: An Extrajudicial Terror Squad

The existence of these forces has been documented since the early days of Guantánamo, but it has rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in congressional inquiries into torture.

On paper, IRF teams are made up of five military police officers who are on constant stand-by to respond to emergencies.

"The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction," according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guantánamo.

The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually 'Gitmoizing' Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons and who reportedly ordered subordinates to treat prisoners "like dogs."

Gen. Miller ran Guantánamo from November 2002 until August 2003 before moving to Iraq in 2004.

When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to 'Darth Vader' suits.

Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg.

According to the SOP memo, the teams are to give verbal warnings to prisoners before storming the cell:

"Prior to the use of the IRF team, an interpreter will be used to tell the detainee of the discipline measures to be taken against him and ask whether he intends to resist.

Regardless of his answer, his recent behavior and demeanor should be taken into account in determining the validity of his answer."

The IRF team is authorized to spray the detainee in the face with mace twice before entering the cell.

"The physical security of U.S. forces and detainees in U.S. care is paramount.

Use the minimum force necessary for mission accomplishment and force protection ... Use of the IRF team and levels of force are not to be used as a method of punishment."

But human rights lawyers, former prisoners and former IRF team members with extensive experience at Guantánamo paint a very different picture of the role these teams played.

"They are the Black Shirts of Guantánamo," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented the most Guantánamo prisoners.

"IRFs can't be separated from torture.

They are a part of the brutalization of humans treated as less than human."

Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 50 Guantánamo prisoners, including 31 still imprisoned there, has seen the IRF teams up close.

"They're goons," he says. "They've played a huge role."

Gang beating them

Forcing their heads into toilets

Breaking bones

Gouging their eyes

Squeezing their testicles

Urinating on a prisoner's head

Banging their heads on concrete floors

Hog-tying — leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end

While much of the 'torture debate' has emphasized the so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' defined by the twisted legal framework of the Office of Legal Council memos, IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them — sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.

The IRF teams "were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law.

This force "was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says.

"They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings.

So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: IRF-ing prisoners or to be IRF-ed.

Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described "the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke."

Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners' "private areas" and Korans to "rile the detainees," saying it "seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always IRFed."

"Up to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the abuses of the IRF officials," according to the Spanish investigation.

Combined with other documentation, including prisoner testimony and legal memos, the IRF teams appear to be one of the most significant forces in the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo, worthy of an investigation by U.S. prosecutors in and of themselves.

Torturing Prisoners at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

Perhaps the worst abuses in the Spanish case involve Omar Deghayes, whose torture began long before he reached Guantánamo, and intensified upon his arrival.

A Libyan citizen who had lived in Britain since 1986, in the late 1990s, Deghayes was a law student when he traveled to Afghanistan, "for the simple reason that he is a Muslim and he wanted to see what it was like," according to his lawyer, Stafford Smith.

While there, he met and married an Afghan woman with whom he had a son.

After 9/11, Deghayes was detained in Lahore, Pakistan, for a month, where he allegedly was subjected to "systematic beatings" and "electric shocks done with a tool that looked like a small gun."

He was then transferred to Islamabad, Pakistan, where he claims he was interrogated by both U.S. and British personnel.

There, the torture continued; in a March 2005 memo written by a lawyer who later visited Deghayes at Guantánamo, he described a particularly ghoulish incident:

"One day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes.

The room was all painted black-and-white, with dim lights.

They threatened to leave me there and let the snakes out with me in the room.

This really got to me, as there were such sick people that they must have had this room specially made."

Deghayes was eventually moved to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was beaten and "kept nude, as part of the process of humiliation due to his religion."

U.S. personnel placed Deghayes "inside a closed box with a lock and limited air."

He also described seeing U.S. guards sodomize an African prisoner and alleged guards "forced petrol and benzene up the anuses of the prisoners."

"The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films," Deghayes said.

When Deghayes finally arrived at Guantánamo in September 2002, he found himself the target of the feared IRF teams.

"The IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and let him fall on his face … " according to the Spanish investigation. Deghayes says he also endured a "sexual attack."

In March 2004, after being "sprayed in the eyes with mace," Deghayes says authorities refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to permanently lose sight in his right eye.

Stafford Smith described the incident:

"They brought their pepper spray and held him down.

They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes.

"Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye.

"He's totally blind in the right eye.

I can report that his right eye is all white and milky - he can't see out of it because he has been blinded by the U.S. in Guantánamo."

In fact, Stafford Smith says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes' eye.

The Spanish investigation into Deghayes' torture draws much from the March 2005 memo, which described several acts of abuse of Deghayes at the hands of the IRF teams.

(The memo refers to IRF by its alternative acronym ERF):

ERF-ing Omar — The Feces Incident

On one of the ERF-ing incidents where Omar was abused, the officer in charge himself came into the cell with the feces of another prisoners [sic] and smeared it onto Omar's face.

While some prisoners had thrown feces at the abusive guards, Omar had always emphatically refused to sink to this level.

The experience was one of the most disgusting in Omar's life.

ERF-ing Omar — The Toilet Incident

In April or May 2004, when the Guantánamo administration insisted on taking Omar's English-language Quran, he objected.

The ERF team came into Omar's cell and put him in shackles.

He was not resisting.

They then put his head in the toilet, pressed his face into the water.

They repeatedly flushed it.

ERF-ing Omar — The Beating

In one ERF-ing incident, Omar was shackled by three American soldiers in their black Darth Vader Star Wars uniforms.

The first was going to punch Omar, but before he could, the second kneed Omar in the nose, trying to break it.

The third queried this, and the second said, "If his nose is broken, that's good. We want to break his ******* nose."

The third soldier then took him to hospital.

ERF-ing Omar — The Drowning

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure.

He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still.

They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop.

This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in.

Omar is particularly affected by the fact that there was one nurse who "had been very beautiful and kind" to him to [sic] took part in the process.

This happened three times.

ERF-ing Omar — Tango Block

Omar was out on the Tango block rec yard when 15 ERF soldiers came, with two other soldiers in the towers, armed with guns.

They grabbed him (and others) and sprayed him.

They then pulled him up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the concrete.

They had someone from the hospital there, and she just watched.

She then came up to him and asked whether he was OK.

He was taken off to isolation after that.

A medical examination cited in the Spanish investigation confirmed that Deghayes suffered from blindness of the right eye, fracture of the nasal bone and fracture of the right index finger, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and "profound" depression.

Evidence Destroyed?

At the Pentagon, an official paper trail should exist that documents the IRF-ing of Deghayes.

Held at the US-run prison in Guantanamo for more than seven years without any charge

What's more, according to Gen. Miller's SOP memo, all of the actions of the IRF teams were to be videotaped as well.

After a prisoner was IRF-ed, "The medical personnel on site will conduct a medical evaluation of the detainee to check for any injuries sustained during the IRF," and, "all IRF Team members are required to submit sworn statements."

These statements, reports and video were "to be kept as evidence."

As of early 2005, there were reportedly 500 hours of video; the ACLU attempted to force their release, but they never have been produced.

"Where are those tapes?" asks CCR President Michael Ratner.

In some cases, the answer may well be that they never existed or no longer do.

"When an IRFing took place a camera was supposed to be present to capture the IRFing," said Army Spec. Brandon Neely, who was on one of the first IRF teams at Guantánamo.

"Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground."

Neeley recently gave testimony to the University of California, Davis' Guantánamo Testimonials Project.

He also described one IRF-ing where the video of the incident was destroyed.

Regarding the videos, Stafford Smith says, "There are some things I can't talk about, but I will confirm there is photographic evidence. I am absolutely confident that if all of the photographs were revealed to the world, they would provide irrefutable physical evidence that the prisoners had been" abused by the IRFs.

As for the "sworn statements" by IRF team members, a review of hundreds of pages of declassified incident reports reveals an almost robotic uniformity in the handwritten accounts, overwhelmingly composed of succinct portrayals of operations that went off without a hitch.

Almost all of them contain the phrases "minimum amount of force necessary" and the prisoner "received medical attention and evaluation" before being returned.

"All internal investigations of Gitmo so far have completely whitewashed the IRF process," says Horton. "They did so for obvious reasons."

"The IRF program was supported by advice secured from the Justice Department suggesting that insubordinate behavior could be cited to justify a departure from guidelines against physical force.

It has a conspiratorial odor to it," says Horton.

"In fact the use of IRFs was illegal, a violation of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention] and a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids the use of unnecessary force against prisoners."

While Spain will probably pursue the role the IRF teams played in the torture of its citizens or residents, its scope goes far beyond those specific incidents.

"I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication."

Deghayes' treatment at the hands of the feared IRF teams mirrors that of several other released Guantánamo prisoners.

David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantánamo, said in a sworn affidavit,

"I have witnessed the activities of the [IRF], which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog ... I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF'ed. I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication."

Torturing Prisoners at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

On one occasion, the IRF Team was called into his cell after al Dousari allegedly insulted a female soldier.

There was blood everywhere

Another prisoner who witnessed the incident described what happened:

"There were usually five people on an ERF team.

On this occasion there were eight of them.

When Jumah saw them coming, he realized something was wrong and was lying on the floor with his head in his hands.

If you're on the floor with your hands on your head, then you would hope that all they would do would be to come in and put the chains on you.

That is what they're supposed to do.

"The first man is meant to go in with a shield.

On this occasion, the man with the shield threw the shield away, took his helmet off, when the door was unlocked ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah's back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight.

He must have been about 240 pounds in weight.

His name was Smith.

He was a sergeant E-5.

Once he had done that, the others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah.

While they were doing that the female officer then came in and was kicking his stomach.

Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation.

"The officer Smith was the MP sergeant who was punching him.

He grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face.

His nose was broken.

He pushed his face, and he smashed it into the concrete floor.

All of this should be on video.

There was blood everywhere.

When they took him out, they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood.

We all saw it."

Force Feeding as a Form of Torture

The IRF teams were also used to force-feed hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo, including in August 2005.

Deghayes was among the hunger strikers, writing in a letter,

"I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell, I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?"

While the U.S. government portrayed a situation where the hunger strikers were being given medical attention, lawyers for some of the men claim that the tubes used to force feed them were "the thickness of a finger" and "were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture."

According to attorney Julia Tarver, one of her clients, Yousef al-Shehri, had a tube inserted with "one [IRF member] holding his chin while the other held him back by his hair, and a medical staff member forcibly inserted the tube in his nose and down his throat" and into his stomach.

"No anesthesia or sedative was provided to alleviate the obvious trauma of the procedure."

Tarver said this method caused al-Shehri and others to vomit "substantial amounts of blood."

This was painful enough, but al-Shehri, described the removal of the tubes as "unbearable," causing him to pass out from the pain.

According to Tarver:

"Nasal gastric (NG) tubes [were removed] by placing a foot on one end of the tube and yanking the detainee's head back by his hair, causing the tube to be painfully ejected from the detainee's nose.

Then, in front of the Guantanamo physicians … the guards took NG tubes from one detainee, and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee.

When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from the other detainees remaining on the tubes."

Medical staff, according to Tarver, made no effort to intervene.

This was one of many incidents where IRF teams facilitated such force-feeding.

Aside from hunger strikes, other forms of resistance were met with brutal reprisal.

Felt up my private parts under the guise of searching me

Tarek Dergoul, a prisoner interviewed by Human Rights Watch, described how IRF teams beat him because he:

"Often refused to cooperate with cell searches during prayer time.

One reason was that they would abuse the Quran.

Another was that the guards deliberately felt up my private parts under the guise of searching me."

Dergoul said:

"If I refused a cell search, MPs would call the Extreme Reaction Force, who came in riot gear with plastic shields and pepper spray.

The Extreme Reaction Force entered the cell, ran in and pinned me down after spraying me with pepper spray and attacked me.

The pepper spray caused me to vomit on several occasions.

They poked their fingers in my eyes, banged my head on the floor and kicked and punched me and tied me up like a beast.

They often forced my head into the toilet."

Jamal al-Harith claims he was beaten by a five-man IRF team for refusing an injection:

"I was terrified of what they were going to do.

I had seen victims of [IRF] being paraded in front of my cell.

They were battered and bruised into submission.

It was a horrible sight and a frequent sight. … They were really gung-ho, hyped up and aggressive.

One of them attacked me really hard and left me with a deep red mark from my backbone down to my knee.

I thought I was bleeding, but it was just really bad bruising."

The IRF-ing of Army Sgt. 1st Class Sean Baker

Ironically, perhaps the most well-publicized case of abuse by this force was not inflicted on a Guantanamo prisoner, but on an active-duty U.S. soldier and Gulf War veteran.

In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker was ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guantánamo where he would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner.

Sgt. Baker says he was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners.

He was told to yell out the code word 'red' if the situation became unbearable, or he wanted his fellow soldiers to stop.

According to sworn statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were restraining an actual prisoner.

As Sgt. Baker later described:

They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down.

Then he — the same individual — reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor.

After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe.

When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.' … That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me.

Somehow I got enough air.

I muttered out: 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.'

Sgt. Baker said his head was slammed once more, and after groaning "I'm a U.S. soldier" one more time, "I heard them say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you know, like … he was telling the other guy to stop."

According to CBS:

Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape.

"I said, 'Go get the tape,' " recalls Baker. " 'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader went to get the tape."

Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened.

But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, "There is no tape."

The New York Times later reported that the military "says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident."

Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day.

"This was just one typical incident, and Baker was recognizable as an American," says Horton.

"But it gives a good flavor of what the Gitmo detainees went through, which was generally worse."

IRF-ing Continues Under Obama

On Jan. 7, 2009, a prisoner named Yasin Ismael threw a shoe in frustration at the inside of a cage to which he had been confined.

The guards accused Ismael of attacking them and called in an IRF team.

His ear started to bleed

According to his attorneys:

"The team shackled him, and he put up no resistance.

They then beat him.

They blocked his nose and mouth until he felt that he would suffocate and hit him repeatedly in the ribs and head.

They then took him back to his cell.

As he was being taken back, a guard urinated on his head.

Mr. Ismael was badly injured, and his ear started to bleed, leaving a large stain on his pillow."

Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 22, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an executive order requiring the closure of Guantánamo within a year and also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there, requiring "humane standards of confinement" in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

But one month later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled 'Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law,' which found that abuses continued.

In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger strike," according to Reuters.

"Certainly in my experience there have been many, many more reported incidents of abuse since the inauguration," Ghappour said.

While the dominant media coverage of the U.S. torture apparatus has portrayed these tactics as part of a 'Bush era' system that Obama has now ended, when it comes to the IRF teams, that is simply not true.

"[D]etainees live in constant fear of physical violence. Frequent attacks by IRF teams heighten this anxiety and reinforce that violence can be inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or sometimes without provocation or explanation," according to CCR.

In early February 2009, at least 16 men were on hunger strike at Guantanamo's Camp 6 and refused to leave their cells for force feeding.

IRF teams violently extracted them from their cells with the:

"Men being dragged, beaten and stepped on, and their arms and fingers twisted painfully."

Tubes were then forced down their noses, which one prisoner described as "torture, torture, torture."

In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating:

"This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I've been subjected to it almost every day," he said.

"Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change."

Al-Jazeera reported:

Describing a specific incident, which took place after change in the U.S. administration, al-Qurani said he had refused to leave his cell because they were "not granting me my rights," such as being able to walk around, interact with other inmates and have "normal food."

A group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets entered his cell, accompanied by one soldier carrying a camera and one with tear gas, he said.

"They had a thick rubber or plastic baton they beat me with.

They emptied out about two canisters of tear gas on me," he told Al-Jazeera.

"After I stopped talking, and tears were flowing from my eyes, I could hardly see or breathe.

"They then beat me again to the ground, one of them held my head and beat it against the ground.

I started screaming to his senior 'see what he's doing, see what he's doing' [but] his senior started laughing and said 'he's doing his job.'"

In another incident after Obama's inauguration, prisoner Khan Tumani began smearing excrement on the walls of his cell to protest his treatment.

According to his lawyer, when he "did not clean up the excrement, a large IRF team of 10 guards was ordered to his cell and beat him severely.

The guards sprayed so much tear gas or other noxious substance after the beating that it made at least one of the guards vomit.

Mr. Khan Tumani's skin was still red and burning from the gas days later."

The CCR has called on the Obama administration to immediately end the use of the IRF teams at Guantánamo.

Horton, meanwhile, says "detainees should be entitled to compensation for injuries they suffered."

As the abuse continues at Guantánamo, and powerful congressional leaders from both parties and the White House fiercely resist the appointment of an independent special prosecutor, the sad fact is that the best chance for justice for the victims of U.S. torture may well be an ocean away in Madrid, Spain.

"The Obama administration should not need pressure from abroad to uphold our own laws and initiate a criminal investigation in the U.S.," says Vince Warren, CCR's executive director.

"I hope the Spanish cases will impress on the president and Attorney General Eric Holder how seriously the rest of the world takes these crimes and show them the issue will not go away."

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, when I was researching that book in the mountains of Laos, hiking from village to village, interviewing Laotian farmers about their opium harvest.

They were telling me that they took it down to the local helicopter pad where Air America helicopters would land, Air America being a subsidiary of the C.I.A., and officers, tribal officers in the C.I.A.’s secret army would buy the opium and fly it off to the C.I.A.’s secret compound, where it would be transformed into heroin and ultimately wound up in South Vietnam.

And while I was doing that research, hiking from village to village, interviewing farmers, we were ambushed by a group of C.I.A. mercenaries.

Fortunately, I had five militiamen from the village with me, and we shot our way out of there, but they came quite close.

Then later on, a C.I.A. operative threatened to murder my interpreter unless I stopped doing that research. And then when —

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, look, in the mountains of Laos, there aren’t that many white guys, okay! I mean, the mercenaries? First of all, the C.I.A. ran what was called the “Army Clandestine.” They had a secret army, and those soldiers that ambushed us were soldiers in the secret army.

ALFRED McCOY: Prior review of the manuscript, and they issued a 14-page critique.

The publisher’s legal department, HarperCollins’s legal department reviewed the critique, reviewed the manuscript, published the book unchanged, not a word changed.

AMY GOODMAN: And the contention of that book was that the C.I.A. was complicit in the global drug trade?

ALFRED McCOY: Right. In the context of conducting covert operations around the globe, particularly in the Asian opium zone, which stretched from the Golden Triangle of Vietnam and Laos all the way to Afghanistan, that in those mountains far away from home, when the C.I.A. had to mobilize tribal armies, the only allies were warlords.

When the C.I.A. formed an alliance with them, the warlords used this alliance to become drug lords, and the C.I.A. didn't stop them from their involvement in the traffic.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you have not stopped looking at the C.I.A.

Now you've written this new book. It's called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

Give us a history lesson.

ALFRED McCOY: Well, if you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay! In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture.

It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain.

Those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost.

From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation.

What they discovered — they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol.

None of it worked.

What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities — Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill — and the first breakthrough came at McGill.

It's in the book. [Showing a page of book to Amy Goodman] And here, you can see the — this is the — if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows — that's the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University —

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research.

He found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses.

Within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.

If you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head.

If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.

The second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center.

Two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques.

They found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain.

You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand — okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment — you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.”

And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they suppurate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.

Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they're short-shackled — okay! — that they're long-shackled, that they're made — several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain.

The combination of those two techniques — sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain — is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique.

Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments that we heard about for years.

But ultimately they were a negative result.

When you have any large massive research project, you get — you hit dead ends, you hit brick walls, you get negative results.

All the drugs didn’t work. What did work was this.

AMY GOODMAN: But when you talk about the ‘everyone knows the LSD experiments,’ I don't think everyone knows.

In fact, I would conjecture that more than 90% of Americans don't know that the C.I.A. was involved with LSD experiments on unwitting Americans.

Can you explain what they did?

ALFRED McCOY: As a part of this comprehensive survey of human consciousness, the C.I.A. tried every possible techniques.

One of the things that they — at the time that this research started in the 1940s, a Swiss pharmaceutical company developed LSD.

Dr. Hoffman there was the man who developed it.

The C.I.A. bought substantial doses, and they conducted experiments.

One of the most notorious experiments was that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, inside the agency, spiked the drinks of his co-workers, and one of those co-workers suffered a breakdown, Dr. Frank Olson, and he either was — I don't know whether he was pushed or jumped from a hotel here in New York City —

ALFRED McCOY: Right, his son Eric Olson insists that his father was murdered by the C.I.A.

Eric Olson believes that his father did a tour of Europe, and he visited the ultimate Anglo-American test site, black site near Frankfurt, where they were doing lethal experiments, fatal experiments, on double agents and suspected double agents.

And that his father returned enormously upset by the discovery that this research was actually killing people.

Eric Olson argues his father was killed by the C.I.A., that he was pushed.

AMY GOODMAN: And didn't they do experiments in brothels in the San Francisco area?

ALFRED McCOY: They had two kind of party houses. They had one in the San Francisco Bay Area, another in New York City.

What they did in San Francisco was they had prostitutes who go out to the streets, get individuals, bring them back, give them a drink, and there would be a two-way mirror, and the C.I.A. would photograph these people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the C.I.A. were running the brothel.

ALFRED McCOY: They were running the brothel. They were running all of these experiments, okay?

They did that on Army soldiers through the Army Chemical Warfare Division.

AMY GOODMAN: What did they do there?

ALFRED McCOY: Again, they gave them LSD and other drugs to see what effect they would have.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did the soldiers think they were getting?

ALFRED McCOY: They were just told they were participating in an experiment for national defense.

It's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm.

Let’s make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often times in common parlance as “torture light.”

Psychological to torture, people who are involved in treatment tell us it’s far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture.

As Senator McCain said, himself, last year when he was debating his torture prohibition, faced with a choice between being beaten and psychologically tortured, I'd rather be beaten.

Okay! It does far more lasting damage.

It is far crueler than physical torture.

This is something that we don't realize in this country.

Now, another thing we see is those photographs is the psychological techniques, but the initial research basically developed techniques for attacking universal human sensory receptors: sight, sound, heat, cold, sense of time.

That's why all of the detainees describe being put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music.

That’s sensory deprivation or sensory assault.

That was sort of the phase one of the C.I.A. research. But the paradigm has proved to be quite adaptable.

One of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, he appointed General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo.

Because the previous commanders at Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory.

Under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm.

They added two key techniques.

They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research.

They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.

Then they went further still.

Under General Miller, they created these things called “Biscuit” teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation.

These psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm.

It had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.

Professor McCoy, we’re going to break for a minute, and then we'll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

[break]

Continue with what you were saying, talking about the Biscuit teams, the use of psychologists in Guantanamo, and then Geoffrey Miller, going from Guantanamo to, quote, “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib.

ALFRED McCOY: In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency.

They — the U.S. military was in a state of panic. At that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib prison.

At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and he brought his techniques with him.

He brought a CD, and he brought a manual of his techniques.

He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.

In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452.

If you look at those techniques, what he's ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation.

If you look at the 1963 C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 C.I.A. Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation.

Then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez's 2003 orders.

There's a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the general principles, this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence.

The specific techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors.

Camo Nama

One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies.

Marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

From ABC:
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News....

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic...

This is not just a smoking gun — it's a MOAB dropped right on the White House, confirming, yet again, what any sentient being should already know: the illegal torture tactics (yes, they are torture; and yes, they are illegal, no matter what "the Attorney General says") used on George W. Bush's Terror War captives were approved by the highest officials of the government, all of whom knew — in exacting, sickening detail — just what they were inflicting.

These cold-blooded atrocities were not restricted to "high value al Qaeda suspects" — the demure fiction that the ABC report, like most others in the mainstream media that have begun, gingerly, to delve into these crimes, still retains. As mountains of evidence has already shown, these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used throughout the Terror War prison system, from top to bottom:

On prisoners rounded up at random in mass raids in Iraq and Afghanistan

All of the atrocities and murders that have thus far come to light from the hellish pit of the Bush gulag are the direct responsibility of the "Principals," the inner circle, the Privy Council, the Star Chamber of the real American government: the "National Security State" that operates outside all law, all oversight, all constitutional legitimacy.

Yet even as the media digs out the workings of this junta, they feel compelled to offer what they believe is a fig leaf that will allow all good and decent folk to retain their sacred faith in American exceptionalism:

"Hey, we're not evil; we only torture the really bad guys, the worst of the worst, the high value al Qaeda scum.

"Torture's too good for the likes of them!"

And the sad fact is, the media mandarins are right.

American society has become so degenerate

American society has become so degenerate that the majority of people — and the entirety of the American Establishment — will now countenance torture, as long as they can convince themselves it is used only against "the bad guys."

At one time, the leaders of this nation condemned and punished the torture even of proven Nazis, on the principle that we must uphold our own humanity, and not descend to the brutish level of the most degraded among us.

But no more.

We are the degraded now.

Ruled by brutes

By deliberate torturers

Military aggressors

Mass murderers who walk the streets freely

Live in wealth and comfort

Receive public honors

Will never face justice

Never have to answer for their crimes against humanity.

If this were not so, these evil counsellors and their leader would already be subjected to the workings of the law:

Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist.

It has a powerful perverse appeal.

Once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control.

So, I think when the Bush administration gave those orders for, basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, I think it was probably their intention that these be limited to top al-Qaeda suspects.

But within months, we were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis.

You can see in those photos, beyond the details of the techniques that we've described, you can see how that once it starts, it becomes this Dantesque hell, this kind of play palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.

Professor McCoy, we’re going to break for a minute, and then we'll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

[break]

Continue with what you were saying, talking about the Biscuit teams, the use of psychologists in Guantanamo, and then Geoffrey Miller, going from Guantanamo to, quote, “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib.

AMY GOODMAN: So when, Professor McCoy, you started seeing these images, the first photos that came out at Abu Ghraib, the pictures we showed of the, you know, hooded man, electrodes coming out of his fingers, standing on the box, your response?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, I mean, the reason I wrote this book is when that photo came out in April 2004 on CBS news, at the Times.

William Safire, for example, writing in the New York Times said this was the work of creeps.

Later on, Defense Secretary Schlesinger said that this was just abuse by a few people on the night shift.

There was another phrase: “Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.”

In other words, this was the bad apple thesis. We could blame these bad apples.

I looked at those photos, I didn't see individual abuse. What I saw was two textbook trademark C.I.A. psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain and sensory disorientation.

AMY GOODMAN: We read our first headline today. It was about Maher Arar and the case — the judge has thrown out against him, the Canadian-Syrian man who was sent back to Syria — the U.S. government calls it “extraordinary rendition.”

He was kept in an underground “grave-like” cell, he described, very small.

He was held for almost a year.

As you showed, and I looked at the book, the pictures of the places where prisoners are kept, and in speaking to Maher, he’s described this level of sensory deprivation.

What about the shape and the size and the coffin-like nature of these rooms?

ALFRED McCOY: The details are often left to the individual interrogators, but the manuals basically describe how you control the process, you control the environment right from the start when you pick somebody up.

So, for example, often times we see in Iraq of people when they're arrested, their arms are behind their back.

They're made to kneel in very uncomfortable positions, and they're hooded right away.

That's one of the things they always specify is the time and conditions of arrest.

You begin to break them down.

You create this artificial environment of control, and then the techniques always vary.

It can be extreme darkness or it can be extreme light; it can be absence of sound or a bombardment of sound.

AMY GOODMAN: And that bombardment of sound is often joked about.

‘Oh, we played Britney Spears really loud,’ or whatever it is.

I don't know if it was her. But that's become a joke when soldiers play loud music.

ALFRED McCOY: That's one of the problems of talking about this topic in the United States.

We regard all of this panoply of psychological techniques as “torture light,” as somehow not really torture.

The U.N. convention bars — defines torture as the infliction of severe psychological or physical pain.

The U.N. convention which bans torture in 1984 gives equal weight to psychological and physical techniques.

We alone as a society somehow exempt all of these psychological techniques.

That dates back, of course, to the way we ratified the convention in the first place.

Back in the early 1990s, when the United States was emerging from the Cold War, and we began this process of, if you will, disarming ourselves and getting beyond all of these techniques, trying to sort of bring ourselves in line with rest of the international community, when we sent that — when President Clinton sent the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention to the U.S. Congress for ratification in 1994, he included four detailed paragraphs of reservation that had, in fact, been drafted by the Reagan administration.

He adopted them without so much as changing a semicolon.

When you read those detailed paragraphs of reservation, what you realize is that the United States Congress ratified the treaty, but basically we outlawed only physical torture.

Those photographs of reservation are carefully written to avoid one word in the 26 printed pages of the U.N. convention.

That word is "mental."

Basically, we exempted psychological torture.

Now, another problem for the United States, as well, was when the U.S. Army re-wrote the Army Field Manual in 1992.

The same period, while, although let’s say the civil authorities were sort of skirting the law by exempting psychological techniques, the U.S. Army re-wrote their field manual with the intention of strictly observing the letter and the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar treaties.

So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave orders for extreme techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for his techniques beyond the Army Field Manual, what that meant is when the soldiers were actually investigated, they had committed crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

ALFRED McCOY: Right. Most Americans think that it's over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act 2005, which in the language of Senator McCain, who was the original author of that amendment to the defense appropriation, the author of that act, it bars all inhumane or cruel treatment, and most people think that’s it, that it’s over.

Actually, what has happened is the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. He refused.

So then they started amending it. Basically what happened is, through the process, they introduced loopholes.

Look, at the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration ordered torture.

President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation, “I don't care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.”

Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives.

They did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles:

One, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties.

Two, that there was a possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture, and the defenses were of two kinds.

First of all, they played around with the word "severe," that torture is the infliction of severe pain.

That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, “’severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,” in other words, right up to the point of death.

The other thing was that they came up with the idea of intentionality.

If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty.

The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts.

Now, in the process of ratifying — sorry, passing the McCain torture — the torture prohibition, McCain’s ban on inhumane treatment, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles.

In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said —

AMY GOODMAN: This was the statement that he signed as he signed the McCain so-called ban on torture?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, he emailed it at 8:00 at night from his ranch in Crawford on December 30th, that he was signing this legislation into law.

He said, “I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America.”

Okay, that was the first thing.

The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's a defense.

So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers.

The third principle was — is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory, and last month —

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

ALFRED McCOY: So, and then in the last month, the Bush administration has gone to federal courts and said, “Drop all of your habeas corpus suits from Guantanamo.”

They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I want to thank you very much, Professor Al McCoy, for speaking with us, professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison, his book A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War On Terror.

(left)

Both soldiers at hard site, as they called the special area at Abu Ghraib prison where they sent prisoners who were so called 'hard cases'.

SOLDIER(S): SPC AMBUHL and SPC HARMAN

(right)

Three detainees at Abu Ghraib prison Iraq were handcuffed together nude.

05/15/04 — Berlin - The case of Asad Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel was pure routine for the American troops.

After the 47 year old family father died on the US military base Al Asad west of the town of Khan al Baghdad in US custody on January 9th 2004, an American doctor filled out a death certificate.

Apparently without doing an examination, and according to the documents, without performing an autopsy, the pathologist Luis A. Santiago wrote that the man had died in his sleep.

The US troops handed the body, including the death certificate, over to the International Red Cross shortly thereafter.

American troops had previously arrested the respected family patriarch on an open road and taken him to the American military base Al Asad west of the town of Khan al Baghdad.

Ostensibly there was suspicion that he belonged to the Iraqi resistance.

The soldiers are alleged to have put enormous pressure on Asad Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel in the base prison.

Another prisoner gave Spiegel TV a detailed description of how the 47 year old was tortured in a sadistic manner for five days.

The witness says that the soldiers also took photographs of the abuse.

Asad Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel died in US detention on January 9th of this year.

However, there are grave doubts about the version that claims his death to have been from natural causes.

An Iraqi forensic pathologist who took the body over from the US armed forces confirmed to Spiegel TV in Baghdad that he diagnosed definite torture marks on the body of the deceased.

In addition, photos of the deceased confirm that contrary to the US documentation, an autopsy had been performed on the man.

The scars on the torso indicate that Western doctors did the autopsy.

Deep Dark Bruises on the Entire Body

Even a layman can easily recognize the obvious effects of violence on the pictures of the body: Large, dark bruises that could come from beatings can be seen on both sides of the body.

On the wrists and ankles there are bruises, which presumably date back to many days of captivity.

There are bruises from beatings or other forms of violent impact on the back.

Other lacerations on the upper body point to injuries which can hardly be called "natural".

If the suspicious facts against the US troops turn out to be true, the US torture scandal would take a dramatic turn.

If the charges hitherto were about violent abuses of prisoners and humiliating methods of interrogation, the investigation would now have to include failure to give assistance, manslaughter, or even murder.

The participating soldiers and their commanding officers could be harshly punished, and the US army in Iraq would be exposed to even more hate and desire for revenge than they already are.

Although there are already a number of investigations being carried out about unclarified deaths in Iraq, and also in Afghanistan, — the army insists that in none of the cases can the guilt of the soldiers be proven.

According to the research of Spiegel TV, the case of the family father Jaleel in occupied Iraq is not a rarity.

Employees of the Forensic Pathology Institute in Baghdad confirm that among the bodies that the International Red Cross has handed over to them on behalf of the Americans there are always victims of torture.

However, the Iraqi pathologists are forbidden to do their own investigation as long as there is an American death certificate — even if the information about the cause of death is obviously false.

The US Army Remains Silent

About five bodies with US Armed Forces death certificates are handed over every week in Baghdad alone, according to the employees of the Institute.

The established practice of the Americans is to declare bodies that come from the prison at Abu Ghuraib as victims of grenade attacks on the camp.

This was the case with the bodies of 26 detainees last week, even though only some of the bodies showed injuries typical of grenade attacks, the employees said.

Meanwhile in the case of the 47 year old Asad Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel, there appears to be an internal investigation of the US troops going on.

Witnesses report that they have been questioned by US soldiers about the procedures on the American military base Al Asad.

Spiegel TV has been attempting to get a statement from the responsible authorities of the army in Baghdad for several days.

Up to now, however, all written as well as oral questions remain unanswered.

This 47-year-old White male died of blunt force injuries and asphyxia.

The autopsy disclosed multiple blunt force injuries, including deep contusions of the chest wall, numerous displaced rib fractures, lung contusions, and hemorrhage into the mesentery of the small and large intestine.

An examination of the neck structures revealed hemorrhage into the strap muscles and fractures of the thyroid cartilage and hyoid bone.

According to the investigative report provided by U.S. Army CID, the decedent was shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth at the time he lost consciousness and became pulseless.

The severe blunt force injuries, the hanging position, and the obstruction of the oral cavity with a gag contributed to this individual's death.

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined on the phone right now from London by Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom passed through the Bagram Air Base. He is legal director of the charity, Reprieve. He joins us on the phone from London. Can you tell us what you know of Bagram?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yes, and, of course, a lot of it is laid out in the New York Times, but there are some things that are considerably worse than represented there. For example, there is an area of Bagram that is not open to the Red Cross, as one of our clients, Mamdou Habib said.

The most frightening moment he had in Bagram was when the Red Cross came and he didn’t get to see them. And there’s a cellar area in Bagram, a dark — a place that’s kept perpetually dark, which is where a number of prisoners are kept away from the Red Cross itself.

And, of course, if you think about being a prisoner in those circumstances, your natural assumption is if the military doesn't want the Red Cross to know you exist, then your fate is probably not going to be a very pleasant one, and naturally a number of those people have been moved off and rendered to other countries, where they have been abused.

Some of them we’ve caught up with again in Guantanamo, but many haven't. They’ve disappeared.

AMY GOODMAN: We're also joined in our studio by Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Does the Center represent people at Bagram?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, like Clive, the Center has many of the similar clients who have been through Bagram on their way to Guantanamo. Moazzam Begg is another one whose story has just come out, how he was taken to Bagram, beaten, etc., and then went to Guantanamo.

We are in contact with people who have family members, who have people in Guantanamo, and as Clive said, a lot of this has been known for a couple — more than two or three years.

I mean, the people who were hung and tortured and killed.

The underground prison has been known, and what’s really incredibly frustrating — you feel like Sisyphus, rolling the stone up the hill, when you think about finally getting some rights for people and visits to Guantanamo, and then what happens is the administration really goes and continues its illegality in other prisons around the world.

So what it really says is that, yes, the struggle is around one prison like Guantanamo, but we have to really root out completely what this administration is doing around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, can you, though, explain? I mean, it sounds like the reason Bagram is growing is because of all of the international outcry around Guantanamo, but also Guantanamo's legal relationship with the United States on a U.S. air base in Cuba.

Can you explain the legality of Afghanistan, where Bagram is and Guantanamo, these two detention camps?

MICHAEL RATNER: Both Clive and I were in the early case about Guantanamo, in which the U.S. tried to say Guantanamo was like Bagram, that there were no legal rights there.

You couldn't go to court for people in Guantanamo. They had no constitutional rights, and the U.S. said it could do what it wanted to people at Guantanamo.

We won a big case in the Supreme Court, the Rasul case in June of 2004, that opened the courts to people at Guantanamo and opened them so people like Clive and Center lawyers could go to Guantanamo.

Even with that, those set of rights, the administration, in the Graham-Levin Bill and the Detainee Treatment Act, is trying to eliminate even those rights we won in the Supreme Court.

But as far as Bagram is concerned, the legal position of the administration is similar to what it was about Guantanamo. There are no legal rights, but they have the additional argument, that they would make, that because it’s not on a U.S. permanent military base like the one in Cuba, that there’s even fewer rights.

I don't think they're correct. I think that any person detained anywhere in the world has a right to go into a court, has a right to be visited by an attorney, but the administration's view is whatever Guantanamo rights are, the rights at Bagram are nil, absolutely none, and so what they did, according to the Times report, was a few months after we won the Rasul case, they said they stopped sending people to Guantanamo and started to send them to other places — Bagram is the one that we know the most about at this point — because the administration's view is that no court, no lawyer, no one, has any right to visit anyone in Guantanamo — anyone in Bagram, and that nobody —and that the people at Bagram have no legal rights at all.

An extraordinary statement in today’s world.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, your response, and also what is the role, if any, of Britain in Bagram?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: My response is that I think, as Michael and I and many others have said for a long time, Guantanamo is something of a distraction.

That people — if you think people have been badly treated in Guantanamo, you should see what’s happened to them in other places, and what’s of real concern, arising out of the New York Times article, is this: The Times mentioned one flight.

It was actually September 19, 2004 where ten people were brought to Guantanamo.

I represent a couple of those.

Of those ten, all of them are extraordinary cases where people were taken and abused horribly in other places.

Would you watch someone as you passed, someone on his knees naked with a bag over his head, bound hand and foot, his knees bleeding?

What would you think?

Would you get cold?

Get a deadening sense of life becoming non-life?

Would that tell you that what was happening was not from good?

That it was from evil!

"They started torturing us before they posed any questions.

Basically they were kick boxing us and looked to be really enjoying it."

A scene of crime, there's a dead body.

There are men with internal bleeding, ruptured organs, broken bones.

They have sandbags over their heads, their hands are bound.

They're lying in their own excrement, semi-naked, semi-conscious, shaking, terrified.

They've been tortured for 36 hours.

BBC PANORAMA

Throughout the detention he witnessed beatings inflicted on his friend, the hotel receptionist Baha Mousa

"Baha was with me from the moment we were arrested.

We were also put in the same cell.

He suffered a lot at their hands.

They were very cruel.

I do not believe they had any feelings.

I would say they were not human."

Kidnap and torture: new claims of Army war crimes in Iraq

Robert Verkaik reveals evidence of systemic ill-treatment of civilians by British soldiers in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam

Published: 18 May 2007

The British Army is facing new allegations that it was involved in "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture of Iraqi civilians after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

One of the claims is made by the former chairman of the Red Crescent in Basra, who alleges he was beaten unconscious by British soldiers after they accused him of being a senior official in Saddam's Baath party.

We asked them if we could use the bathroom and they said: "Piss
yourself here in the room."

We couldn't help it, we had to.

Then there was more and more hitting.

It felt as if they were hitting us with something like a metal pipe.

At about 2am in the morning they took us to the interrogation room.

Photo: Reconstruction based on witness testimonyBBC PANORAMAImage inserted by Kewe.info

The family of another Iraqi civilian claims he was arrested and kidnapped by the British in order to secure the surrender of his brother, who was also accused of being a high-ranking member of the party. He was later found shot dead, still handcuffed and wearing a UK prisoner name tag.

Both cases are being prepared for hearings in the High Court in which the Government will be accused of war crimes while carrying out the arrest and detention of alleged senior members of the Baath party.

Last month, the first British soldier to be convicted of a war crime was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army after being convicted of mistreating Iraqi civilians, including the hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died of his injuries at the hands of British soldiers.

Six other soldiers, including Col Jorge Mendonca, were cleared of all charges.

Lawyers and rights groups say the worrying aspect of these latest allegations is that they show evidence of systemic abuse by British soldiers soon after the fall of Saddam.

Fouad Awdah Al-Saadoon, 67, chairman of the Iraqi Red Crescent in Basra, alleges he was visited by British soldiers at his offices in the city on 12 April 2003 and was taken to the British base at the former Mukhabarat [intelligence] building.

In his witness statement, Mr Saadoon said he was accused of being a member of the Baath party and of using his organisation's ambulances secretly to transport Iraqi militia.

In a detailed account of the abuse that he alleges he suffered, Mr Saadoon recalls: "As soon as I went inside they started beating me.

They used electric cables and wooden batons and they harshly punched me with their hands and boots. I had a heart problem, I was a diabetic and had high blood pressure.

I was hit repeatedly on my eyes which made me collapse unconscious."

And there was a key development.

A new shift of men took over guarding the detainees.

Wakey wakey.....

It was the unit of soldiers who'd first arrested them at the hotel.

It was Lieutenant Rogers and his men - they were back.

These are the soldiers who were not put on trial and yet the judge said it
was from then on during their shifts that the violence intensified.

It was Lieutenant Rogers' men who were now on shift right to the end.

The jailer, Corporal Payne, was in and out too.

He'd taken a special disliking to the man they'd nicknamed "granddad."

On day two a young RAF man called Scott Hughes walked in, curious about the screams:

'Corporal Payne was standing behind granddad.

He kicked him in the lower back region where the kidneys are located.

He groaned in a pained groan.

Corporal Payne then put his hand, using his forefinger and his second finger into like the eye socket and yanked
his head up like trying to... it was as if he was gouging the eyes, like he was trying to pick his head up by his eye sockets.'

Photo: Reconstruction based on witness testimonyBBC PANORAMAImage inserted by Kewe.info

Mr Saadoon was later transferred to the joint American/British-run detention centre called Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq, which the British had set up to process prisoners at the start of the war.

He was interrogated for five days.

Because of the injuries sustained during the beatings his condition worsened and he claims the British flew him to Kuwait for a heart operation.

There he claims he was visited by the International Federation of the Red Crescent whose representatives expressed concern at his alleged treatment by the British.

In the second case, a 26-year-old Iraqi civilian, Tarek Hassan, was arrested in a dawn raid by British troops involved in the rounding up of Baath party officials on 24 April 2003.

His family allege he was held hostage by the British in exchange for the surrender of his brother, Kadhim Hassan, a member of the Baath party.

Five months after his arrest, his family received a phone call to say his body had been found dumped in Samarra, north of Baghdad and 550 miles from the detention centre where he had been held.

Kadhim Hassan, 37, has spent the past three years trying to establish the circumstances that led to the death of his brother.

Now Iraqi human rights workers and British lawyers have uncovered vital witnesses to his arrest and detention.

They have also recovered Tarek's UK identity tag, which indicates he was a British prisoner.

In his witness statement, Kadhim recalls the night his bother was arrested.

"The British were looking for me as I was a high-ranking member of the Baath party," he said.

"I suspect that a financial dispute with one of my neighbours made him inform the British of my rank and he possibly told them some lies which made them look for me."

Kadhim had left the family a few hours before the armoured vehicles carrying the soldiers arrived.

When his sisters contacted the British to find out where the British had taken Tarek, they were told that he would only be released if Kadhim gave himself up.

That was the last they heard of him until five months later.

"He was found," said Kadhim:

"by locals in the countryside ... We went to collect him from the morgue in Samarra, where we found him with eight bullet wounds to his chest.

They were Kalashnikov bullets.

His hands were tied with plastic wire and had many bruises."

Outside the temperature was hitting the 40s.

The men had been in British custody for a day and a night with limited food and water.

'Payne picked granddad up by the back of his collar.

'He put him in the sitting position and told him to get his head up and hold his arms up.

'Then he struck the back of granddad's neck.

'Granddad let out a groan.

'It was like a karate chop.

'Granddad fell back over onto his side.

'Payne then said: 'You're pissing me off now.'

'He karate chopped him again and then he punched granddad a couple of times in his rib kind of area.

'Then I heard a bang, a clunk, a noise like something was colliding with something else.

Now it emerges that Mr Saadoon, who has left Iraq and is working as a businessman in Dubai, met Tarek shortly after he was flown back to Camp Bucca from Kuwait, where he had been receiving medical care.

"I was brought back to Camp Bucca in a van on 21 April and placed in a tent, which held 400 prisoners.

On 24 April Tarek Hassan was brought to our tent.

He was very scared and confused.

He told me British troops had raided his house and were looking for his brother who left the house before the soldiers had arrived.

As I was in bad health, Tarek used to bring me food and care for me.

Tarek was never interrogated while I was at Camp Bucca."

On 27 April the International Federation of the Red Crescent requested the British to free Mr Saadoon and that night he and all 200 others were released in the middle of the night on the highway between Basra and Zubai.

"We had to walk 25 miles to reach the nearest place where we could hire cars," remembers Mr Saadoon.

The Government denies being involved in the injuries suffered by Mr Saadoon or responsibility for Tarek's death.

In letters to the family, the Ministry of Defence makes the point that the bullets that may have killed him were fired from a Kalashnikov weapon and that the area where his body was found was not an area of operations associated with British forces.

But the Hassan family's solicitor, Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, said the evidence showed Tarek disappeared at the hands of UK forces and that the circumstances of his release "significantly increased the risk to his life".

In recent correspondence, the MoD has admitted to the Hassan family that Tarek was held at Camp Bucca but claims that it is a US-run camp and so not the responsibility of the British.

It is a matter of public record that our agents were torturing Iraqis at Camp Bucca

Mr Shiner, who is acting in both cases, said:

"The Government deny any responsibility in a case where a man has been kidnapped by UK forces and killed.

It is a matter of public record that our agents were torturing Iraqis at Camp Bucca and continued to hand over detainees to the Iraqi criminal system even though there was a serious risk of torture or death in detention.

This case is important because if the UK have jurisdiction it cannot allow these incidents to continue and must properly investigate previous incidents".

One of my clients is Binyam Mohammed. He was rendered to Morocco. We’ve got the flight logs. We know the very names of the soldiers who were on the flight, and he was taken there, and he was tortured for 18 months, a razor blade taken to his penis, for goodness sake, and now the U.S. military is putting him on trial in Guantanamo. Hassin bin Attash, a 17 year-old juvenile who was taken to Jordan and tortured there for 16 months. There is a series of these people.

Now, what that prompts is this question, that the people who have been most mistreated in Guantanamo were mistreated elsewhere, and then the administration took a very small number of them to Guantanamo, but the vast majority of them are either in Bagram or in these secret prisons around the world. And most recently, we heard of Poland. We’ve heard of Morocco. We’ve heard of various places.

What I'm afraid is the truth is that the most shocking abuses have yet to come to light, that these people are in Bagram and have yet to talk to anybody, and what the administration is doing is hiding these ghastly secrets.

The question is: What are they going to do about that? What are they going to do when it becomes necessary at some point for these prisoners to be given lawyers? There’s a lot of horror stories, and the administration is just not going to want those horror stories to come out.

So where are these prisoners going to be sent? Are they going to vanish forever?

And unfortunately, the U.S. administration has shown that it is willing to send people to Egypt, where they may disappear, to Morocco, where they get razor blades taken to them, and we’ve got to find out the names of these people first, because the government won't tell us, and then we’ve got to prevent them from being rendered to some country where they effectively die after a bit of torture.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, I wanted to ask you about a piece that appeared in a paper in your country in the Guardian by Suzanne Goldenberg and James Meek. It says, “New evidence has emerged that U.S. forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking trophy photographs of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation.

Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that such abuse took place in the main detention center at Bagram, near the capital, Kabul, as well at a smaller U.S. installation near the southern city of Kandahar. A thousand pages of evidence from U.S. Army investigations released to the ACLU after a long battle, made available to the Guardian.”

And then inside, it says, “The latest allegations from Afghanistan fit a pattern of claims of brutal treatment made by former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and Afghans held by the U.S.

In December, the U.S. said eight prisoners had died in custody in Afghanistan,” and this is according to you, “A Palestinian says he was sodomized by American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Another former prisoner of U.S. forces, a Jordanian, describes a form of torture which involved being hung in a cage from a rope for days.

Hussein Abdelkader Youssef Mustafa, a Palestinian living in Jordan, told Clive Stafford Smith he was sodomized by U.S. soldiers during detention at Bagram in 2002.

He said: ‘They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum — excruciatingly painful. Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream, but I could not stop screaming when this happened.’”

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, you know, Hussein Mustafa, I met with him in Jordan, and he was an incredibly credible person.

He is a dignified older gentleman, about now 50 years old, and he wanted to talk about what had happened to him, but he really didn’t want to talk about that sexual stuff, and in the end, you know, I said to him:

“Look, you don’t have to, but it’s very important if things happened, that the story get out, so they don't happen to other people.”

And in the end he did, and it was in front of half a dozen people who were just transfixed as he described how four soldiers took him, one on each shoulder, one bent down his head and then the fourth of them took this broomstick and shoved it up his rectum.

Now there was no one in that room — and they were from a variety of places — who didn't believe that what this man was saying was true, but I am afraid, I’ve got to tell you, that that’s far from the worst that’s happened.

When you talk about Bagram, when you talk about Kandahar, those aren’t the worst places the U.S. has run in Afghanistan.

The dark prison, sometimes called “Salt Pit,” in Kabul itself, which is separate from Bagram, has been far worse than that, and I can tell you stories from there that just make your skin crawl.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't you tell us something about this place?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: I'll tell you some of the ones, for example, that Binyam Mohammed told me.

He was the man who had the razor blade taken to him.

He was then taken, and again, we can prove it. We’ve got the flight logs. He was taken on January 25, 2004, to Kabul, where he was put in this dark prison for five months, and he was shackled.

You just get this vision of the Middle Ages, where he’s shackled on the wall with his hands up, so he can't quite sit down. It’s totally dark in that place.

When the U. S. says that people are being treated nicely in Bagram, you’ve got to be kidding me.

It’s the middle of winter, and they're freezing to death, and this man was in this cell, no heating, absolutely freezing, no clothing, except for his shorts, totally dark for 24 hours a day with this howling noise around him.

They began with Eminem music, interestingly enough; they played him Eminem music for 24 hours a day for 20 days.

Seems to me Eminem ought to be suing them for royalties over that, but then it got worse and they started doing these screeching noises, and this is going on 24 hours a day, and in the mean time they would bring him out very briefly just to beat him, and this is to try to get this man to confess to stories that they now want him to repeat in military commissions in Guantanamo, and they want to say, “Oh, everything's nice now.”

What he went through, he said, was far worse than the physical torture, this psychological torture that some pervert was running in the dark prison in Kabul was worse to him, and he still suffers from it day in, day out, because of what it has done to his mind, and this is the — what we have to remember is there is someone out there who is thinking this stuff up and who is then saying that we need to do it, and this isn’t some lowly guard who loses control and does something terrible that’s physical.

I mean, that’s awful.

But you’ve got someone out there who is thinking through how we’re going to torture these people with this excruciating noise and these other things, and they're doing this very, very consciously, and the story has a long way before it’s going to be out fully.

MICHAEL RATNER: As Clive is saying, there isn't, and I think, you know, we’re putting this huge effort into closing down Guantanamo, which is crucial, obviously, to do. It will be a major victory, but what we’re running is these so-called “black sites,” torture chambers all around the world, and there isn’t any oversight. Our Congress is just sitting on its hands, not doing anything. The most they ask is they say, “Give us a report on black sites.” Even that isn’t getting through. We have nothing.

This country is running torture chambers around the world right now, and Clive's stories, our clients’ stories, are incredibly dramatic, and his point about the psychological torture is crucial.

It’s what Clive is saying, people have thought about this, but this is something that has been U.S. policy for 40 years of how to really deal with people, not just physically, but with psychological torture, and one of your former guests, I think Al McCoy, had this on in A Question of Torture, saying, this is what really affects people.

Physically, yes, hurts them, but the psychological marks of torture, and when you see the pictures from Bagram to Guantanamo, you know that this is stuff that is not just chance or random. This is going by the book.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about this article in the New Yorker that Jane Mayer had written about Colonel Louie Morgan Banks, a senior Army psychologist who played a significant advisory role in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.

Asked to provide details of his consulting work, he said, quote:

“I just don't remember any particular cases. I just consulted generally on what approaches to take. It was about what human behavior in captivity is like.”

Banks has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi. A biographical statement for an American Psychological Association Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, which Banks serves on, mentions that he, quote, “provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing interrogation support.”

It also notes that starting in November of 2001, Banks was detailed to Afghanistan where he spent four months at Bagram Air Field, quote, “supporting combat operations against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.”

MICHAEL RATNER: What’s remarkable about Banks is he also consulted on Guantanamo.

So here you have this guy who is a psychologist, consulting really on how to break people through psychological — psychological torture is what I would call it, and then he goes from Guantanamo to Bagram.

This is not chance.

This is not a few bad apples.

This is high-level military people working with our military, our C.I.A., in how to break people through torture.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: When you're talking “break people,” and I think that’s a very important word. You know, people bang on about whether it’s torture or whether it’s coercion. Well our highest officials have said that the purpose of all of this is to, quote, “break” somebody, and we get people to confess to stuff that’s absolute drivel.

You take, for example, Binyam Mohammed, again. You have a razor blade taken to you, you have the psychological stuff, you’re going to say anything.

They got Binyam Mohammed to confess that he had dinner with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsey bin al-Shaid, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libbi, and Jose Padilla all together on April 3, 2002, in Pakistan.

Quite apart from anything else, two of them, Abu Zubaydah and Sheikh al-Libbi were in U.S. custody at the time when he confessed to that and at the time that he was meant to be having dinner.

This is a guy that didn’t speak Arabic who was meant to be hobnobbing with half of al-Qaeda.

You get this total drivel out of this breaking of people, and yet, for some reason, the people who are designing Guantanamo think we should carry on breaking them, as did the Spanish Inquisition.

It’s very odd.

MICHAEL RATNER: That’s correct. I mean, it’s — they break them; they get drivel; they get false stories, and so what’s going on?

What’s going on, I think, in part, is an attempt to terrorize people, terrorize the Muslim world and say, “You come into U.S. hands, and we will terrorize you.”

And that’s what they’re doing.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Don’t you think though, Michael — I tell you, I think there’s a slightly bigger danger here, which is the people who are doing this abuse believe the stuff they get.

This is what’s frightening to me, that we end up making decisions based on this nonsense.

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, it’s true. They do believe it.

I think, when you talk to your clients or we talk to ours, the people who are interrogating them actually believe what they're telling them, even though it’s utterly and complete drivel.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. Joining us next is Maher Arar. He is a Canadian citizen who was — well, the U.S. government calls it “extraordinary rendition,” others call it “kidnapped” — when he was transiting through Kennedy Airport from a family vacation to Canada and sent to Syria, was tortured there and held for almost a year. We have been speaking with Clive Stafford Smith, a British human rights lawyer. Michael Ratner will stay with us, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

(left)

SPC ENGLAND stands with a shotgun, with CPL GRANER while they watch the unknown soldier next to the detainee.

Includes two unknown.

(right)

Blood on floor at Abu Ghraib prison Iraq.

Torture was conducted by US soldiers, including possibly CIA operatives, and a dog had just attacked and bitten a prisoner.

I am presently revisiting Fritz Springmeier/Cisco Wheeler's excellent work: THE ILLUMINATI FORMULA USED TO CREATE AN UNDETECTABLE MIND CONTROL SLAVE

When I was three, I became a multiple personality. This was not through any government technique but a natural process that occurred through a traumatic event that the three-year-old personality could not handle.

With regards my own multiple personality, I was not clear as to all its realities until I reached my mid-thirties. At that time, as part of a progression into higher level metaphysics, I began a three year analysis of the workings of the brain, conducted by an inner guide.

The inner guide acted as one might consider a psychologist on this plane, with the difference that my guide knew all the intricacies of my brain and mental development from birth.

At the culmination of the analysis, I experienced a release of the trauma that had taken place at the age of three. This release brought forth in completeness the knowledge of my multiple personalities.

This then led me to search for the source of who I was beyond the brain, a search to acquire knowledge of all my multiple states, which has brought me to an understanding of my Father — as it is termed in the Abrahamic Bibles — to an understanding of my Higher Self.

Revisiting Fritz Springmeier's work on mind control, the truth in the material is meaningful due to my personal experience. I would like to believe much of the torture mentioned is a fabrication of the human mind, not real in a physical sense. However I do see that which humans are capable of doing to each other. The constant wars engaged by governments upon this planet is a base indicator that something is severely disturbed. That there is a vast malignancy within the human psyche due to this violence. Mind control slavery can be created from a divided mind aspect within the brain. If it can be, then why in our present state of affairs would it not be happening. Though I would wish there to be no pyramidal structure, no control that is abysmally evil, I recognize this wish as my dream. It is not present reality

I am placing this work as a download on the site, the work as I received it from http://fritz-springmeier.dbs2000ad.com/

The work of Fritz Springmeier/Cisco Wheeler's is invaluable for any understanding of the upper pyramidal forces that presently control the planet.

Having said this, it is accepted that most people will not be able to absorb more than a little of the material.

This inability to comprehend or take in the material, due to the human brain rejecting as a protective process all information that it considers might place the brain-mind — that which it perceives the reality of mind — in danger.

As with an evaluation of that which was causal of the 9/11 event, the brain by using cognitive dissonance, anger, the turning away at the presentment of such disturbing material, and other avoidance techniques within the brain's knowledge base, the mind that functions inside the brain thus retains harmony; ignorance indeed is its perceived sanity.

Only those who have begun to travel 'down the rabbit hole' will eventually, as they wander, be able to absorb this material in its fullness. For most, acceptance of this information on mind control is at the far end of an accumulation of knowledge of how the planet is presently operated.

Indeed one might say that if one is able to absorb this knowledge, objectively without gross trauma, then one is reaching the light — the light of realness — that the world as depicted in Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' no longer holds. That sanity is at last becoming the norm for one human person.

It is a simplification to say that Christianity and Demonism are opposite sides of a coin.

Demonism — the connection to, and use of, demons — is practised and used extensively by those who seek to maintain political control.

Christianity is also real and can be used effectively — Christianity not in its religious perversities but in its true sense operating inside the realm of spirituality.

Springmeier's hold on Christianity is mind protection grounding. It is necessary that one in studying this material have a ground for the mind that operates within the brain. As with Springmeier, I also have a ground inside the realm of spirituality, for me it is the Higher Self.

It matters not the ground, and this matter is only mentioned so that those whose ground is other than Christianity be aware that whatever their ground is, that is their ground.

The European Union secretly allowed the United States to use transit facilities on European soil to transport "criminals" in 2003, according to a previously unpublished document.

The revelation contradicts repeated EU denials that it knew of "rendition" flights by the CIA.

...Asked in Parliament last week about reports of 400 suspect flights passing through British airports, Tony Blair said: "In respect of airports, I don't know what you are referring to."

The minutes of the Athens meeting on January 22, 2003, were written by the n Greek presidency of the EU after the talks with a US delegation headed by a justice department official. EU officials confirmed that a full account was circulated to all member governments, and would have been sent to the Home Office.

...According to the full version, "Both sides agreed on areas where co-operation could be improved [inter alia] the exchange of data between border management services, increased use of European transit facilities to support the return of criminal/ inadmissible aliens, co-ordination with regard to false documents training and improving the co-operation in removals."

...But this section, and others referring to US policy, were deleted — as a "courtesy" to Washington, according to a spokesman for the EU Council of Ministers.

By Justin Stares in Brussels and Philip Sherwell in Washington Telegraph.co.uk December 11, 2005

New Statesman — May 2004

America's Gulag

Stephen Grey

Stephen Grey uncovers a secret global network of prisons and planes that allows the US to hand over its enemies for interrogation, and sometimes torture, by the agents of its more unsavoury allies.

The airline's operations are embarrassing because they highlight intense co-operation with regimes of countries such as Egypt, Syria and Pakistan, which are criticised for their human rights record.

The movements of these planes expose a vast archipelago of prison camps and centres where America can carry out torture by proxy.

The operations are illegal, in that they violate the anti-torture convention promoted by George W Bush which prohibits the transfer of suspects abroad for torture.

...The former CIA agent Bob Baer, who worked covertly for the US across the Middle East until the mid-1990s, describes how each Middle Eastern country has a purpose in the archipelago.

He says: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan.

If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria.

If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt.”

...In Uzbekistan, a maverick British ambassador, Craig Murray, was put on sick leave after he publicly exposed human rights abuses, including execution of Islamist dissidents by boiling alive.

Uzbekistan is one of Britain's and America's closest allies in central Asia because it has provided bases that have enabled operations into Afghanistan.

The US is settling in for a long-term presence in return for tolerating human-rights abuses.

On 23 October 2001, witnesses saw Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed being bundled on board a Gulfstream V, registration N379P, by a group of masked men.

The plane flew Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed to Jordan.

The following day, the Gulfstream flew to Glasgow Prestwick to refuel, then back to Dulles International near Washington DC.

Amnesty International has repeatedly requested information from the US authorities about the current whereabouts and legal status of Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, but has received no reply.

The Sunday Times of London has obtained evidence that the US government is leasing a special Gulfstream Jet to transport detained suspects to other nations that routinely use torture in their prisons.

Logs for the airplane show the Pentagon and CIA have used the plane more than 300 times and dropped off detainees in Syria, Egypt and Uzbekistan.

The Gulfstream and a similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by American agents from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private company in Massachusetts.

Analysis of the plane's flight plans, covering more than two years, shows that it always departs from Washington DC.

It has flown to a total of 49 destinations outside the US, including the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and other US military bases, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.

Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the planes, which do not have special facilities for prisoners but are kitted out with tables for meetings and screens for presentations and in-flight films.

The US plane is not used just for carrying prisoners but also appears to be at the disposal of defense and intelligence officials on assignments from Washington.

On 18/19 December 2001, according to an inquiry conducted by the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsmen, the Gulfstream V took Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari from Sweden to Cairo.

Amnesty International's records show that the plane had made several trips between Cairo and Prestwick earlier in the month, and stopped to refuel at Prestwick after leaving the two detainees in Cairo, where they were reportedly tortured.

In March 2005, the Chief Parliamentary Ombudsman in Sweden, having reviewed the Swedish government’s role in the transfer to Egypt of the two detainees, concluded that the "the Swedish Security Police lost control of the situation at the airport and during the transport to Egypt.

The American security personnel took charge...

Such total surrender of power to exercise public authority on Swedish territory is clearly contrary to Swedish law."

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined by Stephen Grey, who is a journalist with the Sunday Times, who exposed the story this week, how the U.S. is operating these secret flights. Welcome to Democracy Now!

STEPHEN GREY: Hi.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us further about these flights, who the people are, and how you found out about them?

STEPHEN GREY: Well, first of all, it has remained something of a mystery, the whole story.

Obviously, bit by bit, the whole — this kind of secret world is unraveling.

And we are getting more and more information about the individual cases, where these planes are being used.

What it exposes is the tentacles of a wider system whereby prisoners are being taken in the war on terror, not only to Guantánamo, but to many other place and those places include the prisons of so-called allies of the U.S. and Britain, around the world.

Those countries which are allies of the U.S. include countries where torture is routine.

Obviously, the concerns that many people have are that these kind of transfers basically allow the U.S. to pass prisoners into the hands of the secret police of other countries to do the kind of interrogation, torture in fact, of prisoners that the U.S. is not allowed to do itself.

Kind of torture by proxy.

AMY GOODMAN: The company, can you talk about that?

STEPHEN GREY: Yeah. I mean, I think the company is not that important in a sense.

These are private planes.

They're being leased.

They're not marked.

That's the point about them.

They can appear anywhere, and you have, you know, innocent-looking, if you like, executive jets parked on the runways of airports around the world.

No one is to know they're actually planes run by the U.S. military and intelligence services.

So, they have a perfect cover, if you like.

But it's — what's happening is that — I mean, they're hired from a company that operates in Massachusetts, and others.

But you know, they're probably just a normal, private company.

What they're doing is leasing it out.

They only work for the government.

As I say, the plane is not just used for carrying prisoners.

It's also used for transferring of interrogators and also regular V.I.P. and defense and intelligence officials from Washington.

But what we have found is at least four cases which have emerged where this plane has been seen actually picking up prisoners, and in the first case which we discovered, the prisoner was — the two prisoners were taken from Sweden to Egypt, and at the time — this has happened just after September 11, and it's been going on since, but in this case, just after September 11, two prisoners were taken on board.

The Swedish government never mentioned the U.S. at the time.

They said they were just sending — extraditing two prisoners.

What actually happened was that the U.S. was there with the secret plane.

They stripped these men of their clothes, handcuffed them, put them in diapers, gave them sedatives against their will, put them on the plane, and took them to Egypt.

And since then, we have discovered these planes — these prisoners complained of being very seriously tortured with electric shocks all over their bodies as a result of being taken to Egypt.

That's the consequence of this kind of process which we know is rendition.

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Grey, I want to thank you for being with us, the Sunday Times of London, exposing the U.S. torture flights.

kewe note: Part of the article mentioned at top of page.

Amnesty has done an extensive report on prison conditions in Uzbekistan. See below.

In 2005, the American Psychological Association convened a Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security that concluded psychologists' participation in military interrogations was "consistent with the APA Code of Ethics."

It was later revealed that six of nine voting members were from the military and intelligence agencies with direct connections to interrogations at Guantánamo and elsewhere.

In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with two members of the task force, Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo and Dr. Nina Thomas.

Arrigo says the task force report "should be annulled," because the process was "flawed."

As an example, Arrigo says she was "told very sharply" by one of the military psychologists not to take notes during the proceedings.

She later archived the entire listserve of the task force and sent it to Senate Armed Services Committee.

We also speak with Dr. Eric Anders, a former Air Force officer who underwent harsh training in "SERE" (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) techniques, as well as Dr. Leonard Rubenstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights.

It is not possible for me to adequately express wording for what has taken place in American society, from Obama to Bush and down the line of administrations, with regard to the U.S. government's practices of torture, its sadism, and its continuing killing and injuring of human beings.

Needless to say all who have been involved should not in the future — to human, animal or insect — have any contact.

All in the medical profession, all psychologists and psychiatrists, all military personnel, all government servants involved, should be tried as war criminals of the highest order.